ADMX Experiment
The Axion Dark Matter Experiment
Pierre Sikivie, Neil Sullivan, David Tanner
ALPS Experiment
ALPS (Any Light Particle Search) is an experiment currently being developed to generate and detect dark matter candidate particles in the laboratory. Informally described as shining light through walls, ALPS strives to show the existence of such particles by means of a coupling between axions and photons.
Guido Mueller
Belle and Belle II Experiments
A major collaborative effort at the KEKB accelerator, Tsukuba, Japan.
John Yelton
CCM
The CCM light dark matter/neutrino experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory studies beams of neutrinos (and possible light dark matter!) produced as a by-product by the LANSCE neutron source. UF has been a member of CCM since its early days, in 2019. There the interaction of high energy protons with a tungsten target produces, in addition to the spallation neutrons, copious pions that decay to provide a beautiful neutrino beam comprising νμ, νe and anti-νμ components. CCM will perform a high-precision measurement of coherent neutrino scattering in LAr and use this interaction channel to search for evidence of light sterile neutrinos. In addition CCM can make unique measurements to exclude regions of light dark matter not able to be probed by any other experiment. CCM is located 15 meters in the backward direction from the proton (neutron) beam, and can be moved to several locations to map out the neutrino oscillation pattern.
Heather Ray
CMS Experiment
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two general purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (the other being ATLAS).
Paul Avery, Richard Field, Jacobo Konigsberg, Andrey Korytov, Konstantin Matchev, Guenakh Mitselmakher, Philip Chang
DUNE
DUNE comprises two massive particle detectors: one located at Fermilab, and one located one mile underground at the SURF facility in South Dakota. DUNE is designed to study many areas of particle physics, including matter-anti matter asymmetry using neutrinos, proton decay, and searching for neutrinos coming from supernova. Several smaller prototype experiments are ‘ being performed prior to the finalization and constrution of DUNE. UF is also involved with two of these, proto-DUNE and SBND.
Ivan Furic
IceCube Neutrino Observatory
IceCube is a gigaton-scale neutrino detector installed deep in the ice at the geographic South Pole, Antarctica. It searches for high-energy neutrinos that come from cosmic particle accelerators that can probe some of the most extreme explosions in the Universe.
Imre Bartos
LIGO Experiment
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected the first gravitational waves not only confirmed another pillar of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity but also discovered the first solar mass black holes with masses beyond 20 solar masses and the first solar mass black holes outside our own galaxy. LIGO created a completely new field in observational astronomy. This scientific break through was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.
Laura Blecha, Paul Fulda, Sergey Klimenko, Guenakh Mitselmakher, Guido Mueller, David Reitze, David Tanner, Bernard Whiting
LISA Project
LISA is a NASA/ESA mission led by ESA. LISA’s goal is to detect gravitational waves from sources which can not be detected by ground-based observatories such as LIGO due to their low frequencies. Expected signals range from galactic neutron star binaries to merging super massive black holes in colliding galaxies. LISA will consist of 3 spacecraft flying in a triangular formation with a 2.5 million km baseline. It is scheduled to launch in the very early 2030s.
Laura Blecha, John Conklin, Paul Fulda, Guido Mueller, David Tanner
SBND
The University of Florida group joined SBND in August, 2017. SBND is located in the Booster beamline at Fermilab and is one of three Liquid Argon (LAr) detectors comprising the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. SBND is the closest of the three detectors. There is a need to address and resolve the growing evidence for short-baseline neutrino oscillations and the possible existence of sterile neutrinos. Such non-standard particles were first invoked to explain the LSND anti-νμ to anti-νe appearance signal. A follow up experiment, MiniBooNE, observed a significant excess of events that is consistent with the LSND signal. In addition, recent reactor neutrino experiments have observed a deficit of events in the anti- νe interaction rate that can be explained by an ~eV scale sterile neutrino. Reactor experiments have also observed an unexplained excess of events around 5 MeV. Satisfactorily resolving these mysteries involves a dedicated set of experiments placed on the MiniBooNE beam line as well as experiment(s) using a decay-at-rest neutrino source (CCM).
Heather Ray
SuperCDMS Experiment
The SuperCDMS experiment is searching for direct evidence of dark matter interactions using underground cryogenic detectors. Nearing the end of construction, at SNOLAB, focus of the experiment, is “light” dark matter, particles with masses smaller than ten times the mass of the proton. Such dark matter particles are a natural consequence of recent theories postulating the existence of a ‘dark sector’, and detecting them would open up a window into a completely unknown set of new particles.
Tarek Saab